Dear Evan Hansen,
Today is going to be an amazing day, and here’s why: Because today you are you. And you have made my life so much richer.
I wasn’t sure I was going to write anything about the Broadway closing of Dear Evan Hansen. But then... I did it anyway.
I got into this show in March of 2017. It was a strange time in my life. It was my first year of graduate school. I had this job that was genuinely soul crushing. One of my best friends had just moved across the country.
To put it mildly, I was straight up not having a good time back in 2017. I first properly heard about the show because Alex Lacamoire was being interviewed on NPR. I was like “ah, sweet, I like Hamilton.” And then they played a brief clip of Waving Through a Window...
So I listened to the soundtrack. And something about it just grabbed me by the throat. Within five days of listening to the soundtrack I had already found and watched the OBC boot and begun writing my first Dear Evan Hansen fic The Desperate Type.
I’ve been writing fanfiction for decades, but I have never had a fic get the level of attention that TDT did. And with it brought this fantastic community of lovely people who made me feel like I was a part of something, made me feel like I belonged.
A lot of things have changed for me since that day I first heard about the show. I’ve written literally over a million words of fic in this fandom. I’ve made some lovely and brilliant friends who are so talented that I want to cry. I’ve fallen both in and out of love with somebody I met because of the show.
All of that happened. All of it happened before I ever even saw Dear Evan Hansen on stage. Honestly, I was starting to move away from the fandom a bit when my best friend and I decided to take a trip to NYC. And because he’s a good friend, my best friend decided we ought to buy a ticket. It poured the entire day of the show. I walked into the Music Box looking like a drowned, harassed rat, and yet one of the ushers in their blue striped tie told me they liked the shirt I was wearing.
The show was everything I could have hoped. The boot does not do it justice. The film version simply doesn’t compare. The feeling of overwhelm, of loneliness, of desperation is something that I personally think only stage can capture. And capture it it did.
Reader, I cried pretty much the whole way through Act II. I cried and I held my best friend’s hand and I took in all of the ways this show has changed me and all of the ways I am still the same. I also took in the people in the row in front of us who refused to keep their masks on because the ushers threatened to kick them out, which was both a real thing that happened and also a reminder that a whole pandemic has been happening for much of my involvement in this fandom.
It was only a couple of weeks after I saw the show that they announced the Broadway closing, and I am so grateful that I got to see it without knowing how close I came to never having seen it.
This show means a lot to me. And the Broadway closing is far from the end of the show and its legacy. I hope it means that our little fading fandom might grow brighter again as more folks are able to encounter it.
And in the meantime, I’m grateful for the people I’ve met because of this show. I’m grateful for the warm welcome I have received, the learning I have done, and for the continued motivation to just keep going.
Sincerely,
Me
@sincerely-us